This is Part I of a Two Part Article
How The Common Core Developed
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for K-12 education were adopted by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) in the Spring of 2010. Those standards had not yet been written at the time, so they actually were adopted sight unseen. The CCSS were an initiative by the National Governors' Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to standardize the teaching of English language arts and mathematics and later science and social studies for all states. The goal of the NGA and CCSSO was to modernize the teaching of those basic skills areas to raise the level of achievement of American students to a higher world class ranking and to make American students more competitive for the world job market.There were no public hearings explaining the contents of the CCSS before their adoption. There was really nothing to share with the public at that time except that the standards were intended to be state of the art learning with emphasis on rigor and critical thinking skills for our students. From the very beginning, the push for the new standards did not come from parents or even from classroom teachers. It came from non-classrom teacher elites who believed they had the answer to improving U.S. student performance compared to other countries.
The driving force for the development of the CCSS came from the National Governor's Association with heavy influence from the Hunt Institute and philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and a group called Achieve. (Thank you to Dr. Mercedes Schneider for finding the news stories explaining the involvement of these groups in proposing this standards effort.) The Obama administration as represented by Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan bought into the project from the very beginning. In June, 2009 Duncan announced that 350 million dollars of Race to the Top federal funding had been earmarked for development of the Common Core Assessments. That's the standardized testing that goes with Common Core.
Much of the motivation for this initiative was the claim by some groups such as Achieve Inc. and the Hunt Institute that the United States had fallen far behind other industrialized countries in performance of our students in the basic skills of English, Math and Science. This conclusion was based on the U.S. ranking well below the leading countries on the international student assessment called PISA and an international test of achievement in math and science called TIMSS. It was assumed by these groups that the U.S. ranking compared to other countries must have dropped drastically in recent years.
These conclusions have been seriously challenged recently by education historian Diane Ravitch in her book about American education reform called Reign of Error, and by several university researchers who have pointed out that if the samples of students taking these tests had been more fairly designed, the U. S. would have ranked much higher. Researchers have shown that if poverty levels of students in the different countries were properly matched with our country, the U.S. would rank near the top in comparison to other countries. Ravitch points out that the U.S. students have never performed better than they do today on the international rankings, but that our average achievement statistics are greatly lowered by the much higher than average percentage of high poverty students in our student population than exists in the countries that outrank us on the two international tests.
There is certainly nothing wrong with encouraging and even pushing our students to do better in the basic skills of reading, math and science, and encouraging more of our students to attend college and major in science and math fields. But this could have been done much more effectively and more economically with basic incentives for students such as scholarships and math/science promotions as was done in the early sixties and seventies to encourage students to choose math and science fields. That effort really worked and helped get me and many others into the math/science field. Instead it was decided by the National Governor's Association and also very quickly by the Obama administration that there must be a complete overhaul of the standards and curriculum for K-12 education in our country. It was decided by these non-educators that the U.S. should force or mandate that all students achieve at higher levels in certain basic academic areas. No consideration apparently was given to upgrading the training of students in vocational and technical skills which are also known to produce high paying jobs that boost the economies of nations. Germany for example, is known to have an excellent non-university level of skills training for high tech jobs in their workforce. This system has enabled Germany to prevent the outsourcing of industrial jobs to cheaper workers in other countries such as what we have seen with U. S. jobs. But the elite foundations pushing this initiative in our country decided to place major emphasis on preparing most of our students to enter and succeed at the university level.
How was the
Common Core sold to decision makers?
We need only to use the time
tested practice of “following the money” if we want to find out
what has really driven this nationwide movement that has captured the
support of the big business community and so many elite education
reformer groups across the country. Much of the seed money for the
development of the CCSS came from the Gates foundation. In fact the
Gates Foundation reached out not only to the Louisiana Department of
Education, but to several other states, to the teacher unions, the
national PTA and others and distributed many generous grants to
promote the standards even before the standards were even written. The U.S.
Department of Education, as part of the Obama Race to the Top
competition made the adoption of the standards a prerequisite to
consideration for billions in federal dollars in grants. At that time
State Superintendent Pastorek excitedly announced that Louisiana had
been singled out by the Gates Foundation as one of the targeted
states to receive a multimillion dollar grant in the Race to the Top
Competition. Gates seed money was contributed to Louisiana and Gates
staff helped to write Louisiana's application for the federal grant.
This was happening in the depths of the nationwide recession, and it
was thought that it was a no brainer for Louisiana to compete for
the huge federal grant. Governor Jindal fully supported this effort
and helped pass legislation that met all the U.S. Department of
Education's preconditions for being awarded the grant. No thought was
ever given by the Jindal administration to consult with classroom
teachers or with parents.
It turns out that even though Louisiana became the poster child for the Race to the Top and the Common Core Standards, Louisiana never won the Race to the Top grants, but we did spend millions of our state dollars preparing and competing for the standards. State Treasurer, John Kennedy went before legislative committees to question the millions of dollars in no bid contracts that went to various outside corporations and groups to prepare for more testing and the data collection required by the competition. That's at the same time that state funding for basic education was cut to the bone and some parishes started laying off teachers.
Who wrote
the CCSS?
So who actually formulated
and wrote the Common Core Standards? The Gates Foundation and others
pushed for experts recommended by their foundation and other
education reformer groups such as Achieve Inc. to help write the
standards. (See this Baton Rouge Advocate letter by Vincent Barras) David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board Inc. which
administers the SAT college entrance testing, was chosen as chairman
of the task force writing the standards. This is the same David
Coleman that was rejected for every teaching position he ever applied
for. So instead he became a self proclaimed expert in education
reform. From the very beginning, the primary goal of the new
standards was to prepare students for successful completion of
college. Almost as an afterthought, it was stipulated that the new
standards also described the critical skills that would be needed to
succeed in non-college trained
careers. But there is no question that the writers of CCSS
were primarily college prep oriented. For years academic leaders
whose jobs it has been to promote our university systems have claimed
that both non college careers and college careers really require the
same skills. No study has ever been conducted to verify this
assumption, but it has simply been accepted as fact. It is assumed
that since almost all parents would love for their children to get a
university degree, no one would object to primarily college prep
standards for our K-12 schools.
This is where the project went astray in my opinion. It was apparently assumed from the very beginning that the primary purpose of the CCSS would be to promote critical thinking skills such as those tested by the SAT that were thought to be needed for success in college. Therefore it was believed that the writers of the standards should be experts mostly at the university level or from academically oriented education reform think tanks. Regular classroom teachers at the K-12 level were not part of the writing team. In particular, there were no experts in early childhood education on the writing team.
Data
Collection and Sharing for CCSS
An
important component of the move to the Common Core by the various
states is student data collection and sharing. Some of the chief
promoters of Common Core standards happen to be huge education
services conglomerates such as Pearson Inc., a United Kingdom company
that produces textbook and instructional materials
testing services and online education services, Microsoft, the
world's largest software company, and News Corp, a Rupert Murdock
company that has entered the education services business in a big way
in recent years.
The
directors of these huge for-profit companies concluded early on in
the Common Core development process that if student profiles
including standardized test scores, demographic information,
student disabilities or gifted status and even discipline records could be
used by teachers and other service providers to better address
individual student needs. It is assumed that these large companies
could use such data to market their services to school systems and
even directly to parents. Major changes were quietly made to the
federal privacy laws (FERPA) to allow such data to be collected and
shared at will without the permission of parents.
In
order to implement this data collection and sharing system, the Gates
Foundation and other foundations provided funding of 100 million
dollars to a new non-profit corporation called InBloom created by
News Corp which has now created a massive data collection and student
tracking system that has the capability of tracking voluminous data
on every K-12 public school student in the United States.
Originally,
Louisiana state Superintendent John White had agreed to store and
share all public school student data using the InBloom system. But after
major push-back from many parents across the state, White claims he
has modified his agreement to prevent the identification of
individual students within the InBloom system. The remaining concern
for parents is that White has a recent history with vouchers and
choice course providers of trying to steer education business to
unsavory profit seekers.
(Watch
for Part II of this article, to be posted after Thanksgiving where you
will learn about how the Common Core was field tested, Louisiana's
recent experience with raising standards, the changes we can expect
from CCSS, problems with the Common Core and what Louisiana could do instead
of CCSS.)
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